Publications

Poetry Wales Summer 2017

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Features 

Graham Hartill: Version of Events; Wanda O’Connor: The Practice of Entering; David Greenslade: The Poetics of Cash; John Kinsella: Journaling, an Activist Poetics

From the Archive: Aneirin Karadog on Breton poetry

Reviews

Jessica Pujol Duran  on Currently & Emotion; Emily Hasler on Mark Blayney, Natalie Ann Holborow and Julia Rose Lewis; Claire Crowther on Ruth Bidgood and Deryn Rees-Jones; Rhys Owain Williams on Mab Jones, Claire Williamson and Rhian Edwards.

Poems 

Ghazal Mosadeq and Camilla Nelson, Annie Katchinska, Anna Reckin, Alison Winch, Bronka Nowicka, Luka McDonagh, Tim Cresswell, Vala Thorodds, Fran Lock, David Sargeant, David Ishaya Osu, Jordi Valls, Hannah Youd, Iain Britton, Jo Mazelis, Kate Noakes, Sophie Herxheimer, Meryl Pugh, david Roberts, Robbie Burton, Kate North, Pascale Petit, Nathalie Handal, Gavin Goodwin, Kimberly Campanello and Linda Black.

Full details here.

Lyndon Davies: Bridge 116

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Lyndon Davies’ fourth collection takes a high-dive into the vast but weirdly personal and particular mysteries of place and belonging.

Shifting through forms, registers and perspectives, part journal, part improvisation, part hallucination,

Bridge 116 explores a vision of locality both specific and haunted by many kinds of news from elsewhere. Full details here.

pickles & jams by cris cheek

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‘pickles & jams’ is out now from the excellent BlazeVOX [books]. Beautifully designed, it contains 99 lyrics and is shipping now. You can order direct through BlazeVOX: http://www.blazevox.org/…/pickles-and-jams-by-cris-cheek-4…/. A clutch of responses to the work are on the BlazeVOX page to wet your appetite.

$4 postage for buyers in the UK and EU . . . making the book worth the price of postage alone. Book and postage for a round $20.

The Lost Diagrams of Walter Benjamin

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Edited by Helen Clarke & Sharon Kivland

Essays by Helen Clarke, Sam Dolbear, & Christian A. Wollin

THE LOST DIAGRAMS

Cos Ahmet, Alberto Alessi, Sam Ayres, Patrizia Bach, Martin Beutler,Riccardo Boglione,Vibe Bredahl,

Pavel Buchler & Nina Chua, Emma Cheatle, cris cheek, Kirsten Cooke, Anne-Marie Creamer, Amy Cutler,

Vincent Dachy, Matthew Dowell, Joanna Leah Geldard, Theresa Goessmann, Michael Hampton, Ronny Hardliz, Miranda Iossifidis, Joe Jefford, Dean Kenning, Tracy Mackenna, Bevis Martin & Charlie Youle, John McDowall, Katharine Meynell, Paul O’Kane, Hephzibah Rendle-Short, Mark Riley, Katya Robin, Hattie Salisbury, Isabella Streffen, Stefan Szczelkun, George Themistokleous, Monique Ulrich, Emmanuelle Waeckerle, Matthew Wang, Julie Warburton, Alexander White, Lada Wilson, Louise K. Wilson, Mark Wingrave, Mary Yacoob.

Available here and here.

 

In A Berlin Chronicle Walter Benjamin describes his autobiography as a space to be walked (indeed, it is a labyrinth, with entrances he calls primal acquaintances). The contributors to The Lost Diagrams respond to the invitation to accompany Benjamin in reproducing the web of connections of his diagram, which, once lost (he was inconsolable), was never fully redrawn. They translate his words into maps, trees, lists, and constellations. Their diagrams, after Benjamin, are fragments, scribbles, indexes, bed covers, and body parts. Subjectivities sharpen and blur, merge and redefine, scatter and recollect. Benjamin writes: ‘Whatever cross connections are finally established between these systems also depends on the inter-twinements of our path through life’.

 

Safe Mode by Sam Riviere

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‘In Safe Mode, Sam Riviere boots us into a brazenly undesirable working environment. It’s an atmosphere, a tint, it’s what might happen when clicking back and forth between tabs in this or that rental dump, shifting mental zones, measuring out days through data and the het-up in-folding of strangers. Sam’s major flair is for channelling our maladapted, disassociated softwares. Broken spam filters, tick removal, the world’s saddest polar bear, undealt-with undertones and a ghostly parade of totemic, masculine constructs rise up out of apparently benign linguistic matter. Like being run through a memory test, repetitions occur in sneaky guises, the faulty bits are re-jostled. In here, words and images are fleeting engagements, but, the text implies, attention is your resource – and, if you stay around and look again, you’ll find even stranger zones firing up in the background.’ – Heather Phillipson.

Out now on Test Centre. Safe Mode will be launched at Burley Fisher Books on Wednesday 12 July at 7pm. Details here.

Ailbhe Darcy & SJ Fowler: Subcritical Tests

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A new collaborative work out now on Gorse. 

The nearness of nuclear holocaust, always just one clumsy accident away, forms an entry point into this record of a friendship. The poems in Subcritical Tests stubbornly make connections, ever conscious of the impending threat of annihilation. Oblique, modern, lyrical, humorous, these poems represent the range of Ailbhe Darcy and SJ Fowler‘s individual practices, modulated and melded   through the collaborative process.

London launch of Subcritical Tests 
Monday 10th July 2017, 6.30-10.30pm, Sun & 13 Cantons, Soho
with readings from Niven Govinden, Susana Medina, Colm O’Shea followed by the launch by Ailbhe Darcy and SJ Fowler. [RSVP]
Dublin launch of Subcritical Tests
Wednesday 12th July, 7pm-8.30pm, Poetry Ireland, 11 Parnell Sq East
with Ailbhe Darcy and SJ Fowler, introduced by gorse poetry editor Christodoulos Makris. [RSVP]

Peter Philpott – Wound Scar Memories

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wound

Three poetic sequences, starting from Petrarch’s Sonnets placed in Fontaine-de-Vaucluse, August 2015, travelling through interior language spaces, into some mental version of the Dark Ages in Bishops Stortford, town of tunnels. Then there’s some prose, in case the political implications of a time of migration, cultural re-creation and elite formation are not clear enough. It’s also funny, inventive and moving.

LINK to a sample

£6 – LINK to purchase

A launch also takes place at the next Contraband Poetry Night, The Crown Tavern, 43 Clerkenwell Green, EC1R 0EG, July 4, 7 o’clock onwards – with also (or even better!) Antony John, Sogol Sur and Clive Gresswell.

 

Jesse Glass – Charm for Survivors: Selected Painted Books and Sequences

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This is the first of two colour volumes collecting the visual poetry of the highly
acclaimed poet, artist & folklorist Jesse Glass. The volume contains five painted books that have been exhibited at Tate Britain, The Bury Text Festival, and in the Blackpool Illuminations – where they were seen by 193,073 visitors. These books are: Seven Mad Dances, Codex III, Hell Money Sequence I, Human Centred World, & Charm for Survivors. The books are handsomely presented in a large format (18 cm by 26 cm).

Jesse Glass is a Professor of American Literature at Mekai University in Japan. He has won the Deep South Writers’ Conference twice. Charm for Survivors is due to be performed on CNN in December.

Full details here.

Peter Barlow’s Cigarette 23 – O’Sullivan, Thorogood, Williams, Matsumoto

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Peter Barlow’s Cigarette #23 – ft. Lila Matsumoto, Maggie O’Sullivan, Luke Thorogood, Chrissy Williams

~~~

An afternoon of alternative poetries
Saturday, June 24, 4.00 – 6.00, Waterstones, Deansgate
Free entry, free wine

~~~

LILA MATSUMOTO ~
’s publications include Soft Troika (If a Leaf Falls Press) and Allegories from my Kitchen (Sad Press). Lila’s poetry and criticism have been published in a variety of journals and anthologies including Jacket2, Tripwire, Zarf, and Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry. She has performed at places such as SoundEye Festival and Little Sparta garden of Ian Hamilton Finlay. Lila teaches creative writing at the University of Nottingham, where she she convenes the Nottingham Poetry Series:https://nottinghampoetryseries.wordpress.com/

MAGGIE O’SULLIVAN ~
‘s page at Pennsound (http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/OSullivan.php) is a primary resource for online recordings of her readings/performances. Her website is www.maggieosullivan.co.uk

LUKE THOROGOOD ~
writes about and through the ‘other’, using created characters to explore voice and form. He previously edited Three and a half point 9, and is currently the artwork editor for the Black Market Review. He is completing a masters in Creative Writing at Edge Hill, focusing on writing as created poets. He writes and creates for, along with a group of other writers, part of The Pollyverse, a multimedia extended story world around the adventures of Polly St. Irene.

CHRISSY WILLIAMS ~
is a poet and editor living in London. She has published various poetry pamphlets and her first full collection BEAR has just been published by Bloodaxe. She is director of the annual Free Verse: Poetry Book Fair and currently works as editor on the bestselling comic The Wicked + The Divine. twitter.com/chrissywilliams

Sarah Jacobs – An Accumulation of Fictions

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I have lived quietly in this house for most of my life.
Books accumulated and a space had to be cleared. 100s of volumes of fiction — novels and tales — were selected for the cull.
Before I could dispose of the books I took images of 384 of the volumes and placed them, together with other information, in spreadsheets.
The spreadsheets are a repository for the data.
I also collected text from each volume, following an algorithm which was intended to ensure that I was not just picking out favourite bits, or suppressing parts I did not like.
An Accumulation of Fictions is an aggregate formed from the collected text.

Out now on Colebrooke Publications. The book will be launched on 22nd June with readings from it by M.J. Weller and Richard Makin: Cass Art, 66 Colebrooke Row, London, N1 8AB., 5PM – 8pm.

J. R. Carpenter – The Gathering Cloud

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Building upon a web-based project and a zine by the same name, The Gathering Cloud collates research into the history and language of meteorology with current thinking about data storage and climate change. This research material is presented as a sequence of hendecasyllabic texts and images, acting both as a primer to the ideas behind the project and as a document of its movement between formats, from the data centre to the illuminated screen, from the live performance to the printed page.

The book features a foreword by media theorist Jussi Parikka and an afterword by poet Lisa Robertson, as well as thirty-two photographic illustrations, and seven digital collages. Out now on Uniform Books.